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Disable Windows Defender Security Center Tray Icon

Windows 10 Creators Update version 1703 brought yet another change to Windows 10's UI. There is a new app called Windows Defender Security Center. The application, formerly known as "Windows Defender Dashboard", has been created to help the user control his security and privacy settings in a clear and useful way. Windows Defender Security Center got a tray icon, which is visible out of the box. If you are not happy to see it, here is a way to get rid of it.

You can launch Windows Defender Security Center from the Start menu or with a special shortcut. Alternatively, you can access it using its tray icon. As of this writing, it looks as follows:

There is a helper tool which draws the icon. It is located here:

"C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MSASCuiL.exe"

This file runs at startup when you sign in to your Windows 10 account and so the icon appears in the tray. To get rid of the icon, you can remove MSASCuiL.exe from startup. This operation has no side effect and will disable the tray icon completely.

About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

This icon should be manageable from Settings pane to enable or disable system notification area icons, as WDSC is for many things that the classic Security and Maintenance (formerly Action Center) Control Panel applet. Even when in Windows 10 they call Action Center to notification and quick action repository, former Action Center (w7-8.1) had a notification area icon that was turnable on or off by this setting.